Good news...

I'm very happy to report a reconciliation between the love-birds: a coincidence, that yesterday was Valentines Day? I think not.

In worse news, however, category 3 Cyclone Pat has swept across Aitutaki, where we're going next week, causing damage to 70-90% of the houses on the island, bringing down trees and breaking someone's leg. Fortunately the resorts, she said selfishly, are apparently ok, having been more sturdily built than people's houses; and we'll still be going. At least the risk of having a coconut fall on my head must now be much reduced.

Frightening the punters

I'm writing a story about Oxford now, linking it with the new Tim Burton 'Alice in Wonderland' movie starring Johnny Depp (looking confusingly like a psychedelic Frodo) as the Mad Hatter, and the endearingly game Helena Bonham Carter, with her head swollen to three times its normal size, as the Red Queen. Lewis Carroll was of course Charles Dodgson, a mathematics don at Christ Church College, where I went last year thinking more about Harry Potter than Alice. (The dining hall above stood in for Hogwarts.)

Dodgson told the story to Alice and her sisters on a long row along the Thames to a picnic. Alice was nothing like the blonde cutie in Tenniel's illustrations and every cartoon/movie since, including the new one. She had short, dark hair and looked rather bossy, so the story was no doubt a self-preservation strategy for Dodgson. They were in a row-boat, but punting is equally popular in Oxford.

So it is also in Cambridge, where we had a pleasant outing along the Cam in a punt propelled by someone else (much the best way to do things: it can be a very wetting activity for those who don't know what they're doing). I was interested to read recently that in the summer just gone, the river became so congested that at times there was punt rage.

The report said that insults had been hurled, also mugs of tea (how English!) and there had been sabotage under cover of dark, with punts set adrift and even cut in half. Consequently, next year fewer will be allowed to register for business, and some visitors may have to miss out.

In other words, planning on having a punt could actually be a bit of a gamble.

Pathe-tic News

Brangelina may be claiming a united front, but sadly our free-range lovebirds seem no longer to be an item. We’ve only seen a single bird lately, so the inevitable conclusion has to be that the other has met an untimely end. I watched the survivor sitting on a branch today for more than 10 minutes, calling and calling and getting no answer, poor thing. Anthropomorphic it may be, but he seemed lonely.

Better news is that the bird table, in its summer incarnation of bird bath, is a popular innovation: so far anyway only with the sparrows and doves, but that’s ok. It’s nice to see them drinking deeply before plunging in for a quick splash and a flutter.

Worse news is that the tomatoes are full on at the moment and very popular with the birds, especially one busy but rather dim thrush, who repeatedly picks a cherry tomato off the vine and flies with it into the hen run to eat, whereupon he’s mugged by one of the hens, who instantly gobbles it down – so the thrush flies off to repeat the process, and then so does the hen.

The Baby reports from Brisbane that a cormorant sat on her back and kicked her in the face - a friendly cormorant, she insists. It hardly seems like cormorant behaviour, but better one of them than a pelican, which are also very common in Queensland, lumbering around like Catalinas (reference here to the Solent flying boat we went to see at MOTAT last weekend, the last one to fly the Coral Route through Aitutaki, where we're going next week).

And a report in the paper about moas and cassowaries, which are not apparently related, although I wouldn't want to meet either: not much chance of that with the moa, all eaten by the Maoris; but cassowaries aren't uncommon, frightening people who have heard how they can disembowel a kangaroo (or person) with one slash of their powerful claws. There was one at Adelaide Zoo - she had big eyes and pretty eyelashes, but also cankles.

Up, up and away

Toadstools on the path down to the henrun this morning, and acorns scattered over the pavement on my walk: though the days are still swelteringly hot, autumn is on its way.

There was a hot-air balloon over the upper harbour this morning, too. I haven't seen one for ages: they're not hugely unusual here, but nowhere near as common as they were where we lived in England. We'd often wake to see three or four drifting over Penyard Hill, alerted by the barking dogs or the sound of the gas jets as they fired up. Once I was towelling off in the bathroom and looked up to see one through the skylight, directly overhead.

Ross-on-Wye is a centre for ballooning, mainly because of Ian Ashpole, an enthusiast who was known for his stunts: we lay on our lawn once and watched him bungy-jump from a balloon; another time he walked a tight-rope between two baskets.

I went up in a balloon from Ross late one summer, on a golden evening. It was brilliant, and not scary at all: it went up as fast and as smoothly as a lift, and then we just drifted over the low-lit countryside, looking down at the villages, the ploughing and sowing patterns in the fields, dipping low over the Wye, then high as high, and again low enough to pick leaves from the top of an oak tree. We frightened some sheep and they ran away into the next field, pouring through the gateway like sand in an egg-timer.

What made it even better was that the wind took us near Linton and I was able to see our house and all my familiar surroundings from an unfamiliar angle. Then we floated away towards Hereford, slow and silent apart from when the burners were on, with no sensation of wind because we were moving with it. When we came down, it was so gently that I scarcely needed to bend my knees as we bumped: it was all very civilised.

Much less civilised was my other balloon flight, in Canberra, because of the timing: early morning, so it was a brutal awakening, but worth it of course once we were up and drifting over Lake Burley Griffin with the dawn mist lifting and stained pink and gold in the sunrise. We landed next door to the Mint, where the pilot told us a worker had stolen some extraordinary sum by simply filling his lunchbox with coins, day after day. Good to see persistence rewarded.

Burn-offs? A load of bull, apparently

It's hard to believe, but it's a whole year since the dreadful fires in Victoria, and the papers are full of stories by the survivors, describing what is almost indescribable. The image that's stuck with me is fire pouring across the ground like a liquid. It's hard to make any comment that doesn't sound trite, about something so elementally terrifying.

Fire is of course an intrinsic part of the Australian environment, to the point where a number of plant species rely on it for reproduction - but it's still alarming for a first-timer to come across burn-offs crackling away untended for miles along the road, as I did on my '05 trip to the Northern Territory. It seemed to clash with the signs about preventing fires - "We like our lizards frilled, not grilled" - but the idea behind cool burns is to keep the undergrowth down, so it doesn't fuel the hot burns that will kill all the vegetation, trees included. It was certainly impressive to see how soon the cycads put out feathery green leaves, and gum trees started sprouting from the bases again.

Not everyone, though, thinks that something the Aboriginals have done for thousands of years is such a good idea: there wasn't even agreement amongst park rangers on my most recent trip to the Territory. And at Coodardie Station, they don't do it at all, arguing that their cattle trample the grass into a mulch that's less flammable and also protects the soil moisture from evaporation. It's worked for them for 45 years - and for the ground-nesting creatures that flourish there.

Salt of the earth people, these holistic pastoralists: we had a lovely home-cooked lunch on their wide, shady veranda before standing in the back of the ute for a bouncy tour of the property, and an introduction to their prize-winning Brahman cattle. There was a docile bull snoozing on their lawn as we ate, and Clair told us how an 8 foot* python grabbed her Jack Russell one night, and when she pulled him out of the snake's mouth, it came after him again. Nice.

* Although it's form for the Aussies to appear laid-back about stuff that shocks tourists - snake or crocodile length, flood depth, etc - I note that despite having been metric for years, in these cases they always use imperial measurements. Bigger numbers, see.

In a state in the Banana State

I'm just back from the airport, having delivered the Baby there for her first solo foray overseas: to Brisbane for 10 days to use up some expiring airpoints. It's a bit of a turn-around, me turning around and coming back home again, and her being the one to fly off somewhere fun. Though I did bump into Martin there.

I hope it's fun for her, and she learns things and makes some good memories and maybe even some friends, and gets a taste for seeing other sides of life. But Brisbane? I struggle a little with Brizzy.

My first time there, a bit older than the Baby, I had just arrived and was standing on the street on a Sunday evening, waiting for a bus to get to the Youth Hostel on the edge of of town. I wasn't sure it would actually be coming, it being Sunday evening and all, and then a young guy in a car pulled up to the kerb and asked for directions to Queen Street. I made some joke about Queen St in Auckland, tried to remember where it was in Brisbane, and was just getting to the end of my stuttering directions when I looked at him properly and realised that he was exposing himself - at the precise instant that he presumably lost his nerve, and took off with a screech of tyres. No points for my powers of observation - nor for the size of, er, him either. But it made me lose my nerve too, and I scuttled round the corner to tuck myself away in the People's Palace in a room like a toothpaste tube box, tall and small but at least lockable.

Second time, I thought I was just passing through, but after queuing for half an hour at the Qantas desk for a QF flight onward to the Whitsunday Islands, the clerk told me, "That's a Jetstar flight, you should be at the other terminal, it's three kilometres away, you'll have to take a bus. Next!" So I took a taxi and arrived ten minutes too late to check in, even though the plane was still there right outside the window. Missed flight: what a horrible feeling that is. I didn't much enjoy my unscheduled night in the city before flying out next morning.

Third time was last year, after a Gold Coast assignment, when I had to explain to the woman at the Avis counter that I was returning a replacement hire car because the original one was still in a parking building back at GC. I'd had to abandon it after dinner in a fancy restaurant, having knocked the keys into the loo as it was flushing, and seeing them swept away in a nano-second. If ever I've wanted to turn back time, that was it - especially when I was rolling up my sleeve to reach (in vain) around the U-bend. I'll draw a veil over the "how do I get back to my hotel with no money and into my room with no key?' scenario, and the humiliation of having to tell all sorts of official people. But at least the Avis lady thought it was funny.

So, Brisbane? Not one of my favourite places in Australia. I hope the Baby has a better time.

Angelina Jolie: SA poster girl

So I'm writing a piece about the Heysen Trail in South Australia that runs for 1200 km between the Fleurieu Peninsula and the Flinders Ranges, having walked a tiny section of it near Victor Harbor recently, and I'm wanting to compare it with Angelina Jolie because although it's beautiful, it's also a bit scary. I'm thinking of her drinking blood, slashing pillows with knives, the tattoos, that sort of thing; not really the baby collection or stealing Brad from poor Jen-who's-so-nice-and-Friendly.

But maybe it's being unfair to the scenery, which is impressively large-scale and varied, with amazing rocks painted with lichens, towering cliffs, sandy beaches, thickly bushed or wide-open spaces, burnt gold or sage green or deep red or misty purple - and that's just the little bit that I saw on my five-hour stroll. Further north there's wine country, farmland, forest, gorges, townships and the ancient, astonishing rock formations of Wilpena Pound. Pretty spectacular - or, pretty and spectacular.

But also slightly alarming: precipitous drops to rocks far below where the sea foams in; not just one or two, but six different seriously spiky plants along the part I walked alone; and the constant danger that if you're sucked into stopping to admire the view, which you will be, you're entirely likely to find, suddenly, that your lower legs are swarming with unnecessarily big ants, that are biting. And that's not to mention the possibility of snakes.

The guys soaring over our heads in their paragliders were above all these pedestrian worries (though they could have had that extra one, about doing an Icarus). It must have been glorious up there.